Final Fantasy I

Did Garland knock you all down? Did he haunt you later? If you don't know, you're clearly not old-school, are you? It's okay, it's easily remedied. Get your hands on the original Final Fantasy and give it a play.

If you played Final Fantasy when it first debuted on the Nintendo Entertainment system, you were probably one of the following:

A hardcore video gamer;

A dedicated tabletop RPer;

Someone new to both, who maybe had dabbled a bit in a Dragon Quest or something and was looking for another hit.

Back when this game came out, it was different for American gamers. As referenced above, Enix' Dragon Quest/Warrior series had been in US gamers' hands for just a short time. For the NES, it was about the only game in town for the small group of console Role Playing Gamers. If you had a Master System at the time, you also had the option of Sega's first two Phantasy Star games. But those games hadn't yet found a big market, and Nintendo had something different in mind for Square's first major foray onto American shores.

Square wasn't doing well at the time of Final Fantasy. Legend has it that now-famous producer Hironobu Sakaguchi was on the way out the door, and had one last ditch effort to come up with a game that would make Squaresoft rich. It was his "Final Fantasy" to produce the tale of four Light Warriors bent on saving the world from Chaos. It made a splash in Japan in an uncrowded RPG market, and two years later was destined for the States, backed by Nintendo's juggernaut distribution channels (not to mention article after article in Nintendo Power and a companion NP strategy guide). The rest is, of course, history, at least until Square-Enix brought it back to life for a 2003 Playstation remake with 16-bit graphics and FMV, and an even more tweaked version arrived for the Game Boy Advance in late 2004. But, hey, let's also not forget the 2007 PSP release! It's a lot of mileage for just one game, huh?

As you enter the Final Fantasy section, we hope you enjoy it. We know that the cult gamers will always play it on NES, but people wanting to get a taste for history might prefer to pick up Final Fantasy Origins and play the revised version. Therefore, we're proud to present you full data for both versions, a feat undone by any other site that we know of. Just switch between them whenever you like, and enjoy!